Monday, June 14, 2010

GOP Follies

Republicans are really endangering their chances of making big gains in the Senate this year by continuing to nominate far, far right candidates like Sharron Angle and Rand Paul.

In March we found that 9% of voters in the country disapproved of Barack Obama but also thought that Congressional Republicans were too conservative. At that point those folks were planning to cast almost a bloc vote for the GOP in this fall's elections, 78-11 on the generic ballot. If the GOP was nominating moderate or even just nominally conservative candidates those folks would surely stay in the party fold. But they're really putting those voters up for grabs and letting Democrats back into some of these races by nominating the most far right candidates possible.

If the Nevada Senate race was an up and down referendum on Harry Reid he'd be done. It's hard to imagine any scenario where his approval rating will be over 50% by November. But by nominating Angle instead of someone like Danny Tarkanian they've made it so these folks who don't like the Democrats but think the GOP is too extreme really have to think hard about which is the lesser of two evils.

Certainly a lot of these voters may stick with the GOP whoever its candidates are- but even a small shift toward the Democrats among these 'two evils' voters could tip some close races into the Democratic column.

You're missing some data. In 2006 Congressional Republicans got 1.4 million less votes than 2002. Congressional Democrats went up 8.4 million. In 2008 Congressional Republicans got 3.6 million less votes, while Congressional Democrats got 12.5 million more.

You could draw two conclusions from this.

1) That we all saw the light and became Democrats2) That Republicans were disillusioned with the Republican Party and stayed home.

Since most Republicans consider themselves conservative, rather than moderate, it stands to reason that they were unhappy that the candidates were too moderate. Do you keep going with the moderate candidates who couldn't get enough moderates to win or go with more conservative candidates who can?